Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Visual Frequency of Black LifeLove, Labor, and the Practice of Refusal

The Visual Frequency of Black LifeLove, Labor, and the Practice of Refusal How do we engage a contemporary visual archive of blackness that is saturated by the proliferation and mass circulation of images of violence, antiblackness, and premature death? This article explores the labor required by visual enactments of black precarity in the work of filmmaker and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. The labor of black precarity—specifically, the work required to cultivate, maintain, or articulate our relationship to black precarity—is the effort required to position oneself in proximity to, or in a place of discomfort and, for some, potential complicity with, black precarity. The article stages an encounter with the affective registers of refusal enacted in a genre of black visuality defined as still-moving-images. Still-moving-images hover between still and moving images and require the affective labor of feeling with or through them. The article concludes by expanding the discussion of Jafa’s still-moving-images into a broader enunciation of the author’s theory of hapticity, a term that articulates the labor of feeling across difference and suffering as an effortful practice of exertion and struggle to remain in relation to or in contact or connection with another. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Social Text Duke University Press

The Visual Frequency of Black LifeLove, Labor, and the Practice of Refusal

Social Text , Volume 37 (3) – Sep 1, 2019

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/the-visual-frequency-of-black-lifelove-labor-and-the-practice-of-xd7YOr9H8e

References (13)

Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press
ISSN
0164-2472
eISSN
1527-1951
DOI
10.1215/01642472-758503
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

How do we engage a contemporary visual archive of blackness that is saturated by the proliferation and mass circulation of images of violence, antiblackness, and premature death? This article explores the labor required by visual enactments of black precarity in the work of filmmaker and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. The labor of black precarity—specifically, the work required to cultivate, maintain, or articulate our relationship to black precarity—is the effort required to position oneself in proximity to, or in a place of discomfort and, for some, potential complicity with, black precarity. The article stages an encounter with the affective registers of refusal enacted in a genre of black visuality defined as still-moving-images. Still-moving-images hover between still and moving images and require the affective labor of feeling with or through them. The article concludes by expanding the discussion of Jafa’s still-moving-images into a broader enunciation of the author’s theory of hapticity, a term that articulates the labor of feeling across difference and suffering as an effortful practice of exertion and struggle to remain in relation to or in contact or connection with another.

Journal

Social TextDuke University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2019

There are no references for this article.